Navigate:

Obama faces new questions on drones

Obama administration policy guidance says the fact that a document is a draft is not, by itself, sufficient reason to withhold it from the public. The New York Times reported it requested the white paper from the Justice Department in December, which denied access last month on grounds it could interfere with the “deliberative process.”

The administration official also said Holder was not suggesting more documents would be released, but was referring to the fact that as he spoke officials were still trying to figure out which version of what document had been leaked.

Text Size

-

+

reset

Don’t confuse a legal fight with a political one

Many Democrats who were up in arms about President George W. Bush’s war on terror have been conspicuously silent about Obama’s use of drones. Save for a handful of libertarians, tough-on-terror Republican lawmakers have either endorsed the president’s policy or called for Obama to be even more aggressive.

“There’s been no robust oversight of this,” Osburn said. The only known public hearing devoted to the issue was a 2010 session of the House Oversight Committee.

However, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a statement Tuesday that, behind the scenes, her panel has been conducting “appropriate and probing oversight into the use of legal force. She acknowledged, though, that despite the panel’s efforts, its members have yet to see the classified memos from which the white paper was derived.

In some measure of current concern in Congress about the issue, a total of 11 senators signed a letter to Obama on Monday asking him to fork over the original classified opinions. Eight Democrats signed on, including Wyden and Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont — but not Feinstein. Only three Republicans joined: Mike Lee of Utah, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Susan Collins of Maine.

In a Washington Post poll taken last February, 65 percent of Americans approved of Obama’s use of drones against U.S. citizen terror suspects, while 26 percent disapproved. And despite some noise from the left on the issue, support for drone operations was nearly as great among Democrats as the public at large.

Drone policy critics weren’t predicting a sea change because of the new memo, but they sounded hopeful it would give their arguments more traction.

“For clear political reasons within and outside the U.S., people did not want to put a lot of pressure on Obama” before the election, O’Connell said. “But now he’s not running for anything. So maybe they will.”